"Freedom." he said.
I stared at him. Worked my jaw. Thought about it. Said:
"Just another way of saying 'nothing left to lose'…"
We finished the journey in silence.
They took Moto away to be looked after and sat the others down to eat and drink. Pork, bread, freshly harvested vegetables, thick soups and wooden bowls of porridgey-paste and whiskey. I eyed it all longingly as Slowbear led me away. Nate tried to follow, shivering as he came-down off whatever he was on, but a couple of big guys wearing freaky blue masks politely told him to get some food in his belly, and steered him back towards the campfire.
I made a mental note to have a word with the guy. He looked like death warmed-up, and things had been far too crazy for far too long for me to find out what he was taking.
Where he'd got it from.
What the hell he was doing…
The big mobile home was a lot more impressive on the inside than the out. Someone had stripped out most of the dividing walls and blanketed the floor in a cosy mish-mash of cheap Persian rugs, animal skins, fur-coats and a thick pile of carpet off cuts. It was like wading through the shaggiest patchwork in the world, and contrived to give the structure an earthy, russet-brown air; helped along no end by the chipboard walls. Each panel was so industriously graffitied with a swirling combination of text, iconic drawings and childlike scribbles that each component ceased to have any meaning on its own, and became just a part. A raw splat of language, of culture.
I caught myself getting abstract again, and noted the thick pall of smoke in the air, the sweet-sour smell of something that wasn't just tobacco.
Ah-ha.
It was weird. It was like I'd stepped through the door of this whitewashed suburban kitschism and entered some magical beaver-lodge. Some ancient cave, or skin covered bivouac. It just happened to have a few more right angles than you'd expect.
Slowbear lurked at the door and waved me inside.
"Who'm I looking for?" I asked, irritated by the mystery.
"The boss." He grinned, and closed the door.
At the end of the hallway I came to a large chamber, where the windows were boarded-up and the high ceiling lost behind a canopy of drooping skins and weird shapes. Knotted ropes and dyed fabrics, a mournful cow-skull and a stuffed eagle turning on a string tied to the roof-joists. There was a very old man sitting beneath it, hunched over an electric fire, wearing a bland little chequered shirt with a brown waistcoat. His hair was almost white, and pulled back in a silvery ponytail that left his face uncovered; magnificently under lit by the glowing heat. Each line on his face was a fissure in a great glacial surface; ruddy-red but still somehow icy, like it radiated age and a slow, unstoppable determination.
There was absolutely no doubt at all that this man was in charge, in every sense, and despite the lack of gaudy costumes and outrageous symbols, I had to wrestle with my own desire not to dip my head.
He was smoking a pipe in the shape of a bear-totem. It looked cheap.
"Please," he said, and waved to a low chair placed opposite him. I made a move towards it, not thinking, and hesitated. Call me shallow, but the memory of the food cooking outside and the hole in my stomach was more powerful than I'd expected.
"No offence," I said. "But is this likely to take a while? I'm fit to fall down, here."
And then I smelt it.
Rich. Gamey. Good enough to kill for.
Vegetable aromas mixed with the smoky emanations of the old man's pipe, underscored at all times by the unmistakable scent of cooking meat. I realised with a stomach-gurgling jolt that the chamber led – via an archway in the corner – into a kitchen, and from inside caught the shadow of movement and a fresh burst of steam and smoke.
I almost dribbled.
"It is on its way." The old man smiled. He had a kind voice, and spoke with the thoughtful enunciation of a man to whom English is a second language.
I sat.
"Who are you?"
"Tadodaho." He said. "You would say… Chief. Over all the Haudenosaunee. Over the sachem council."
"And why have you brought me here, Chief?"
He puffed on the pipe, letting white coils billow upwards with that curious slowness of silt sinking through water, but reversed; rising to the surface, lifting up to Abstract bollocks.
Hold it together.
"You are here for a talk with the highest authority within our great Confederacy." He smiled, rotating the pipe in nimble old fingers. "The Haudenosaunee have been waiting for you."
"You knew I was coming?"
"Yes."
"You sent that kid to fetch me."
"Yes."
"How did he know where to look?"
He held out the pipe.
"A better question is: how did he know how to look?"
I pursed my lips. Stared at the pipe for a long time, then slowly shook my head.
"No thanks."
Clear head.
Know everything.
Cover the angles.
If my refusal constituted some big bloody cultural insult, or whatever, the old man gave no sign; shrugging good-naturedly and continuing to smoke himself.
Eventually, as the silence was killing me and the desire to blunder through to that kitchen and go crazy was starting to hotwire my muscles, he sighed through eddying clouds and said:
"My blood is not like yours."
"Excuse me?"
"Blood, Englishman. Blood types. I assume you are normal? Type 'O'. Rhesus negative. Yes?"
It was fucking weird, I don't mind telling you; sitting there in that warm lodge with a genuinely creepy tribal mystic, listening to him go off on one about bloody pathology. Like a brontosaurus with an MP3 player.
"Well…" I said, a touch too sarcastic. "You'll notice I'm technically alive..?"
"Mm."
"Then obviously I'm O-neg… What the fuck is th-?"
"I, on the other hand, am not."
He stared at me. His face was still. And in his eyes, oh fuck, I could see, I could just tell:
He wasn't lying.
"You're…? I don't underst…"
"Nor do we. Not fully. I tell you this because it will help you to understand why we have brought you here. We know you have desires of your own. Agendas. It is our hope that ours might briefly… compliment your own."
I swallowed. My mouth suddenly felt dry.
"Tell me more. About the… about how come you're still alive."
"I cannot. I do not understand such things. What I know is that of all my people alive before The Cull – my true people, stranger, by blood and birth – less than one half perished. Regardless of blood type.
"This, we hope, is welcome news to you.
"This, we hope, will give you some hope of your own."
He knows.
The old bastard, he knows what I'm looking for…
But if he's right. If he's telling the truth, then couldn't it mean that – don't even THINK it! Don't even dare to hope – that there's a chance?
That I didn't come here for nothing?
I must have looked thunderstruck. Sitting there, mind back flipping. The Tadodaho was tactful enough to say nothing, watching my face, and when five old ladies magically appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, each bearing a wooden bowl, each bowl smelling like it'd come direct from an all-angels edition of Masterchef, even then my excitement at the feast couldn't quite sever my thoughts.
Some people. Some people lived through it, who shouldn't have.
Look at these folks.
Look at John-fucking-Paul.
Wasn't it possible?
I started eating like a man possessed, nodding thankfully to each woman as they delivered venison, sweet-potatoes, beans, sour-bread… In the confused fug of my thoughts – made sluggish by surprise and smoke – I noticed the last of the entourage wore flowing robes of a particularly vibrant red and had a cute little radio-mic clipped to what passed for her lapel. I squinted, trying t
o remember why this was significant, but couldn't. I thought the group might shuffle out of the room as they'd come in, but they gathered instead in a huddle of smiling faces and crinkled skin behind the Tadodaho, and stood there staring at me.
"The men of the Church," the old man said, watching me eat, "have their own interest in our survival."
I scowled, wiping sauce off my chin. "Why?"
"We don't know. All we understand is that their Collectors come to our lodges every day. In greater numbers. With guns and bikes and metal cords. Every day they come, every day they steal away our people."
"They take your kids?"
"There are no children left to take, Stranger. They have… widened their attentions. Any Iroquois, by birth. Any redskin. Any who survived the Cull, who should not have.
"They are killing us, little by little, Englishman. And we would like your help."
I stopped eating. I hadn't expected him to wrap-up so soon, and it felt like every eye in the room was boring into me.
Worse, the eyes shifted. Swirled. I shook my head to clear the sensation.
"And… and that's why you brought me here?" I mumbled, trying to stay focused. "To help you beat-off the bastards?"
The room suddenly seemed far less angular. Tapestries became rocky walls. The steam from the kitchen was an underground river, spilling through sweaty caves.
"Sorry." I said, shaken. "My fight's not with the fucking Clergy. They got in my way, I took what I wanted. End… end of story."
Somewhere, a million miles away, I felt the bowl fall from my hands and spill across my legs. I felt the room move sideways. I felt the skins drooping from the roof writhe and flex.
"We understand." The Tadodaho said. "We know. And do not think us so crude that we would attempt to convince you otherwise. You are a stubborn man, Stranger. We have always known it."
"Then… thuh… then why… brng…me here…?"
Slurring.
Not good.
Something in the food.
Drugged.
Panic.
"I told you," the old man's voice said, from far, far away. "You are here to talk with the highest Authority within our Great Confederacy."
"Buh… But…" Every word was a struggle. Every syllable a living beast that fluttered from my mouth and scuttled across the air, leaving trails of purple and green fire. "But we bin… bin talking alrrrrrdy…"
Somewhere out in the soup of my senses, the Tadodaho's face coalesced.
"Not me." He smiled. "Not me."
And then five shapes – five woman-faces that rippled like ploughed earth and swarmed with a host of stars and fireflies – bulged together around me, hooked soft fingers beneath the skin of my mind and dragged me down to the past.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
They're watching me, but maybe there's not much I can do about that just now.
They're in every detail. Flaws, mainly. Like when you remember something with such crystal-clarity that you know every line, every shape, every resonance…
…and then you look up expecting to see London's grey skies, and there's a face looking down instead.
…and then you shake the blood off a knife, or finish retching with the force of your anger, and the droplets splattered on the floor form eyes, and stare right at you.
These memories, they're full of rage and violence and weirdness. And the thing with weirdness is, there's always room for more.
Things keep changing. Time keeps jumping. There's a roar in my ears like I'm underwater, but I'm not scared. They're watching me – those withered Injun women – but so what? They're talking to me, too, and their voices are pretty, and maybe I'm talking back or maybe I'm not, but either way: they're in here with me. Spying on my past.
Back to the start.
Back to London.
After I got the signal, in the comms room of the old MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross, where I'd whored myself to the SIS for years and years, I sliced up some people good. Clergy. I don't recall how many. I was too focused.
We'd all seen the planes. Every rat-human crawling in the filth of London knew they were there. Blue-painted, marked with the red 'O' of the Church, going up, coming down. Why? Who knew. Who cared.
I went to Heathrow. My mind was a needle. Too angry to speak. Too focused to negotiate.
PANDORA
PANDORA
PANDORA
Like a mantra, see?
Nothing would turn me. I'd impale anything that dared get in my way.
And I waited. Cut and slashed in the night. Hacked open necks. Cut off fingertips. Made grey robes run red.
Not because I hated the Clergy.
Not because they had anything to do with anything.
Not for any reason except they were convenient, and they had something I wanted.
Took me three days of torturing to work my way up to a Clergy-bastard of sufficient hierarchical power to be worth taking hostage. I think – I know – I stopped being me for a bit there. Let the animal thing take over too much. Let the rampage-instincts out of their box.
It was a weird time.
I made sure everything felt significant, everything felt like a step in the right direction, and by god's own piss it felt good. I let everyone I came across seem responsible, took it all out on them, mixed up the anger with the focus, just like they taught me in training:
Made it personal.
So what I did, back at the start, I strolled into the airport as bold as brass, with this pigshit priest under my knife, telling every gun-wielding arsehole who came near to back off or get splashed.
And this guy, this hostage, this high-up canon or whoever he was, he leaned down so the knife was pressed up against his neck… and he shook his head.
Slit-slat-slit.
Faith. That's what. Obvious really. Never take any wanker prisoner who's prepared to die for his beliefs.
So bang went my clever-clever attempt to hijack a plane alone, which is all I ever wanted out of those child-stealing sadistic delusional fucks. Bang went my momentum, bang went my anger, bang went the feeling of progress, of inertia-less drive. The juggernaut rolled to a halt.
Cue running away, hiding, rethinking.
Cue a realisation or two: doing it alone wasn't going to work. Focus wasn't enough.
Enter Bella.
I found her waiting outside the airport, just standing and staring. Like she was shellshocked, maybe, except it looked like she'd been that way for years. Watching every plane, mumbling to herself. Waiting for something to happen.
I happened.
Cut forwards in time.
Bella telling me she knew how to fly.
Recon of the airport.
Preparing. Arming-up.
Getting drunk one night and fucking, and not caring except to feel the guilt, and letting down the shields for five seconds and discovering – holy shit – I'm still human after all.
Telling myself I didn't care what her story was. Listening anyway.
They took her kid.
They took a thousand kids. Every week, another load. Off across the ocean. Off to be with the skeletal bastard Abbot off the TV. Off to a better life, or a worse one, or who knew what, except that it was OFF.
Scared. Crying. Can't you just imagine them?
(The faces in the clouds are watching and nodding, and saying yes we can, and wiping tears and telling me to get on with it.)
And then there was Bella, saying:
"Doesn't matter. Not your problem. But that's why I'm going."
And then the time comes and we make our move, and con our way inside, and kill our way further, and gather guns and steal drugs, and then it's sprinting across tarmac, and guns opening fire, and pain in my shoulder, and Bella dragging me up the steps, and then And then away. Stateside-bound.
And then the story started.
And Bella died in fire and pain and chaos.
And Nate and the city and blah blah blah.
"Doesn't matter," Bella
told me, as we clung to each other in the dark. "Not your problem."
After everything she did for me. After she flew me and died for me. After she gave me back my humanity, and stuck a booster up my hope.
"Not your problem."
And all the others. The people of London who bartered and fed me, and said hello every day, and didn't care that I didn't say hello back. The scavs of New York, who died and cried and followed me, despite my lies, into the jaws of hell. The Iroquois, who sent their scared little envoy to watch over me, then saved me themselves on the road.
All of them. Children stolen away. Tears long since run-out. Dead inside, but still fit to help. Still fit to see hope for a better tomorrow. Still fit to smile and think the best, and do something good.
And here's me. Here's me pursuing my own goal and forgetting the rest. Damn the world. Damn every motherfucker alive. Ignore it. Let it happen. Be selfish, why not?
Nothing to do with me.
"Not your problem," she said.
Well shit.
About time I made it my problem.
They were coming. So said the Tadodaho.
(Or, rather, so said the Matriarchs, who whispered and sighed in dark corners then told the Chief what to say and do. It amounted to the same thing.)
I didn't bother asking how they knew. Scouts, surveillance, divine-bloody-intuition, I didn't know. Or care. I'd just taken a lazy stroll through the psychedelic bullshit of my own mind, and if the weirdest thing to greet me on my return was the rock-solid assertion that the Clergy were coming, here, en-masse, then frankly it was a taste of reassuring normality.
They were following me, I guessed. We'd got past their psychotic Collectors, but it didn't matter. Their base in NY was overrun and they'd came pelting out here in my wake. Why?
Revenge?
Maybe. But it sounded like a lot of hard work to go to, just to kick the arse of the guy who'd rattled them up. So why else? Unless…
Unless they were going to the same place as me.
"What's the plan?" Nate said, hours later, when my head stopped spinning from its heavy barrage of hallucinations and synaesthetic memories. We were still sat at the fire between the caravans, watching the evening roll-in, just the two of us. Nike was laid-up in one of the 'vans, dosed out of his skull, and Moto refused to leave his side. Tora… Tora's body had been found near where the Collectors caught-up with us. I didn't like to ask what state it was in. Malice went and oversaw a quiet cremation outside the camp, and I'd figured it would be rude to invite myself along. She hadn't said anything, but there was an unspoken accusation in her eyes as she wandered off:
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